The Dunes of Aelius¶

Emotions ran high among the homins that day. They tread once more upon the lands of their ancestors, a few dunes lost in the desert where the Fyros had lived before the Great Swarm came. But the homins weren't there to reconquer the land nor to feast; the divine powers had sent them there to collect the resources needed to build their temples. The collection of these resources was to provoke a veritable blood bath on the Dunes of Aelius.

The same raw materials were needed to build both the temples of Jena and the sanctuaries of Ma-Duk. Within a few minutes, the Kamist and Karavaner harvesters were fighting over the deposits they had discovered. The warriors grabbed their weapons, the magicians invoked the supernatural forces and soon a pitched battle was under way.

Day and night, the homins clashed in the name of Jena and Ma-Duk. The battlefront fluctuated, each side taking it momentarily before being pushed back under the weight of a counter-attack. In the meantime, the harvesters filled their bags with the shells, resins and wood of Aelius. The presence of kitins made their task extremely dangerous. Fighters were kept off the front line to repel the kitin attacks. Fortunately, this homin intrusion didn't provoke any reaction from the kitins.

Weighed down with raw materials, the harvesters returned to the construction sites and handed their precious loads over to the master crafters, who then distributed them to the crafters to turn into parts for the future temples. The heroes' hearts were filled with joy and pride. Their names would be recorded for ever more on steles created by the gods, saving them from the oblivion and the void into which ordinary homins sink.

Not all shared this joy and pride. Some homins were disgusted by the suffering and death brought about by the divine quarrel. These unfortunates wept to see their dream of universal fraternity shattered by divine will. In their time of despair, Tryton sent them his emissaries, but the message delivered aroused anger and exasperation and was swept aside in shouts and recriminations. Tryton once again warned the homins about Jena and Ma-Duk. He also maintained that, as long as the two powers were fighting each other, homins still had hope but, if one defeated the other, then homins would be enslaved for evermore. So Tryton asked the homins to take part in the fight in order to maintain the balance of power and to keep hope alive…

Some time later, the deposits on the Dunes of Aelius began to dry up. The homins were still far from finishing the parts of the temples to be built using the resources extracted from the Dunes. However, the two sides were on an equal footing, no faction having managed to gain the upper hand. Impressed by the devotion of their respective followers, both Jena and Ma-Duk helped them. The parts needed to build the temples were multiplied through divine intervention! This miracle strengthened the faithful's fervour even more. It was now time to leave the Dunes of Aelius; the building of the temples would continue in another place, on the peaceful banks of a forgotten lake.